In Season - Autumn

September is the beginning of harvest time and the garden takes on an autumnal glow, although the days often remain pleasantly warm.  Many summer flowering perennials are still in flower well in to the autumn making it difficult to distinguish between the two seasons.  Continue to dead head the faded flowers as this may encourage further flowers later in the month.  

October and foliage steels the show as the leaves begin their colouring process before they fade and fall.  Rose hips and berries provide food for the birds.  Although autumn is closing in on the garden, there is still a blaze of colour with Asters, Sedums and the reds & yellows of Rudbeckia. Cut down to ground level any summer flowering perennials that have finished flowering.

Japenese anemones are in full flower now, they are such graceful hardy perennials, adding colour to otherwise fading borders.  Other perennials still flowering are pictured below, Astilbe, Viola, Sedum, Dahlia, Aster, Rudbeckia, Chrysanthemum & Thalictrum

Sedum, a magnet for bees and other pollinating insects, their huge flower heads soon attract the small tortoiseshell butterflies.  There sturdy but fleshy leaves appear during the spring and even during the hardest of winters their flower heads look sureal when coated in frost.  They are drought tolerant too.